


Prometheus

by laughablyunimportant



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Cannibalism, Character Death, Complete, Gen, Starvation, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-17
Updated: 2012-01-17
Packaged: 2017-10-29 17:11:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/322198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughablyunimportant/pseuds/laughablyunimportant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Jade have an entire battleship and five planets stocked with food. Rose and Dave are less lucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prometheus

           The first time you try some grubloaf, everyone laughs at the face you make, even Terezi. You spit it out, not even caring how uncool you look, just needing that rancid rotting-corpse flavor gone _fast_. All there is to wash it down is water, since everything else is troll, and tastes just as bad. The flavor doesn't go away for a few days (or maybe you just get used to it), and you vow to never eat any troll food again.

           Watching Dave experiment with troll cuisine was certainly an interesting experience, one that you were sure to not repeat. It did, however, beg the question of what you and your brother would use to sustain yourselves on this three-year journey. You attempted to use your vision as a Seer to determine what the most fortuitous route would be in regards to keeping the both of you fed, but either the matter was too trivial, or the game saw no particular route as more fortuitous than another, seeing as you would continue to live regardless, because no answer presented itself. Perhaps, as gods, the two of you no longer required sustenance at all. Perhaps you had risen above base bodily functions.  
           That was proven wrong a few hours in, when your stomach started rumbling. So much for rising above the mortal coil.  
           After Dave's performance, you are reluctant to attempt to eat any of their food. Though they claim to have had items analogous to human cuisine on Alternia, the only items readily available are their "stock" or "staple" items, all of which put off nausea-inducing fumes, and are occasionally still moving around on the plate. Still, hunger will drive a woman to wild things, and after nearly sixty hours on that blasted rock without a bite to eat, you sit down to partake in a meal.

           Rose is still throwing up.  
           You're tempted to say you warned her about those, those, whatever the trolls are eating, those meals you guess, fuck if you know, but she just looks so pathetic clutching the edge of the toilet bowl with her hands, eyes red-rimmed and watery as snot dribbles from her nose and she heaves until there's nothing left to heave up but bile, which just keeps coming because as similar as trolls and humans look, they can't eat the same things at all. So you hold her hair for a while and tell Kanaya she's not seeing anyone, and even though she whines out a "fuck you" between bouts of retching, you know she's grateful you drove away her sort-of lesbian girlfriend when she looks like something closer to a horror movie monster than her normally coiffed and poised self. She falls asleep on the floor curled around a trash bin, a line of spittle dry on her chin, and you wish you could help her somehow, but all you can do is get her a glass of water and hope it doesn't set off another fit.  
           Fuck you're hungry.

           It is interesting how the basic bodily desires seem so irrelevant until, very suddenly, they are extremely, incredibly, wholly relevant.  
           You have never before felt quite so hungry. You have described yourself as such, certainly, as parched or starved or voracious, any number of pretty words that boil down to expressing a need for sustenance. Intake of energy necessary for continuation of life. People like to think that they have risen above such needs, that food is a creature habit they indulge, a pleasure they partake in that is at its heart a bodily sin. They have forgotten the basic struggle to survive, the fundamental equation balancing food and life, too preoccupied by the symbols of wealth to remember that wealth was just a means to an end—good living. Or, well, perhaps you are being unfair. Perhaps in this instance you are saying "people" when you mean middle-to-upper-class Americans--when you mean, not just the rich, but all those of enough means that they have never been forced to skip meals for days at a time due to lack of sufficient funds. People like you.  
           It is not funds that you lack now, but material goods. All the boonbucks in the world will do you no good if you cannot eat them.  
           Actually…

           Yeah you definitely can't eat boonbucks.  
           You're not sure why Rose tried. Girl's gone loopy after three weeks without food. That stupid brightlight Vampire Sparkle isn't helping things, sucking on her neck and leaving her all limp and weak for you to take care of. Shit, you can hardly take care of yourself at this point. Captain McFuckface seemed like just the sort of takes-himself-too-seriously douchebag to keep you entertained for the next three years, riling him up and watching him explode, maybe punching his lights out a couple of times, but yesterday he pushed you over and he didn't even seem to be _trying_. Then you just laid there, because as bad as it looked, as horrible as it was to be sprawled out and vulnerable for all those stupid fucks to see, you just couldn't find it in yourself to get back up. Rezi helped you eventually, picking you up and dragging you back to the room you claimed as yours, and damn, was she really that strong, or had you just lost that much weight?

           Dave isn't looking very good.  
           You know that you aren't either. Sometimes you will forget what you are doing in the middle of doing it. Sometimes you will snap at someone for no reason, then wish they'd come back the moment they leave. You're starting to break out in a rash, and that's somewhat worrisome. Kanaya keeps hovering, and while you'd like to appreciate her concern, you also feel like she expects it to be reciprocated with sympathy for her, since her food sources are also less reliable than alchemizing new foodstuffs. You'd like to be polite, you would, but it is hard to do so when you can feel the life draining out of you when she so much as eyes your neck.  
           You have to find a way to make some food.  
           It starts with very reasonable experiments, cobbling together items that you have, like plants and fruit gusher wrappers, to try to produce something vaguely edible. All that produces is a plastic plant, so this time you try again, with the SBaHJ comic about Nanchos, and some empty dinner plates. That just turns the dinnerware into shitty pixelated plates with pictures of food scribbled all over them. While edible, you do not think this offers much nutritional value.  
           Though you were keeping careful track of your tried combinations and results, you eventually just begin throwing random things in the alchemizer, hoping for a stroke of luck. When that fails and you run out of on-hand items, you punch holes at random, convinced that somehow, you will have to hit upon a food combination. Didn't Jade alchemize lots of food? Why didn't she send you the codes for that, instead of that stupid sappy letter that did little but reassure everyone she and John were alright, a perfectly clear jump in logic to make based on the facts available, not to mention obvious to a Seer?  
           You do not realize that you are trashing the alchemiter until one of the trolls, the short pointy one, Terezi, tries to stop you. You punch her in her stupid little face. When she tackles you in rebuttal, you try to bite off her ear.  
           For a moment, there is flesh in your mouth, warm and pulsating, and it is the most delicious thing you have ever tasted. Then someone is tearing you away, tearing the food away, and you kick and claw and scream until something collides with your head and everything goes dark.

           You need to figure something out before you both go insane. Unless that's already happened. In which case, you guess, fuck it.  
           Terezi keeps giving little side-darting glances at Rose's crumpled form, and you'd think she was planning on getting some kind of revenge if Karkat wasn't lecturing her about interspecies blackrom while he bandaged her ear. You'd make some quip about them only being allowed to make with the makeouts if you got to watch, but you're just too damn tired. When they told you to come deal with Rose, you came, but now you're just sort of sitting there next to her, wondering if you should lay down and go to sleep too. But everything hurts too much to do that; in addition to not eating for, for, shit you don't even know how long and you're the knight of fucking time, you also haven't been able to sleep for a few days. Swallowing hurts. Moving hurts. So does staying still. Everything hurts and you feel too fragile, stretched and thin, skin cracking at the edges and dry dry dry, ready to blow away in a stiff breeze. You're not sure you'd mind. But you've got to stay. You've got to make sure Rose is alright.

           You are not alright. Neither is Dave. You don't know what you're supposed to do about it. Between hallucinations about food, you drink water, hoping to feel full for a little while. Then you get truly desperate, and start eating the troll food, looking for something, anything you can keep down. You feel full for one glorious moment, before it all comes hurtling back up, and then you feel scraped-out and raw, burning and empty, so empty, emptier than your mother's heart, emptier than the abyss the horrorterrors reside in, emptier than your well of inspiration because fuck pretty words you just want something to _eat_.  
           You'd curse the gods for putting you in this position, but oh, it looks as though you are the gods. Isn't that ironic, Strider. Look at how much you are laughing, because your starvation is just so. Damned. Ironic.

           One day, Rose just doesn't wake up.  
           It doesn't take long to notice, since her breathing has become so labored, her thin frame heaving to expand a shrunken rib cage to pull in stale air to sustain a rapidly dying body. Dead body, now. Brittle and paper-thin, skin dry under your touch, you just sort of look at her and think, _lucky broad_.  
           Takes her a while to come back. You guess that, if you had the option, you'd spend a little time away from being able to feel, too. Now that you think about it, you _do_ have the option. But you don't have the energy to get up and find a weapon to do yourself in. You don't even have the energy to tell one of the trolls to do it for you. So you close your eyes, laying down next to Rose, waiting to die.

           For one glorious, fantastic, magnificent moment, you feel fine. Then all of that hunger hits you at once, your stomach gives a massive growl, and you tumble to the ground, dropping the foot or so you were hovering to land with a heavy _mmph_ , knees jarring on impact. Your body is reset to full and beautiful and fat, so _fat_ , but you can feel it working against you already, breaking things down and ferrying them around to different muscles, setting the digestive process in motion. You wish you could tell it to stop. You wish you could tell it that you don't need to move, if it will just not let that happen to you ever again. But it's not like your body is a thing separate from yourself that will listen. That would be just silly.  
           At your feet is Dave, eyes open and red, slowly focusing on you. His lips are cracked and bleeding, face sunken in on itself until he's almost unrecognizable, arms so thin you'd be surprised if he could lift them, let alone his swords. His belly is distended in that odd eight-months-pregnant way that you didn't think was real, until now you've seen it up close, experienced it first-hand. His mouth trembles, and you know he's trying to say something. You know the only thing worth trying to say at this point, too. Edging closer, you lightly rest your foot just over his throat. His eyes close with what you imagine is relief. Then you press down with all your weight, hearing a snap, like the dryness of Dave goes all the way to his bones.  
           You hope that your brother can make being dead last longer than you did.

Your first thought when you open your eyes back up is the same one you've had for the past two months: _food_.  
           Your second, more coherent thought is, _I've got to keep this from happening again_.  
           You think you know how.

           He comes back almost immediately, and you are disappointed in him for not savoring the moment of nonexistence for a while longer, though you suppose you are glad to have the company. That is probably why he came back so soon, you think. The stupid prick doesn't know when to leave you well enough alone and take an hour for himself. You'd think he'd have a better grasp on the concept, possessing the title Knight of Time, but alas, his expertise in the passage of one moment to the next seems to have been shoved aside in favor of making endless pointless copies of himself.  
           Speak of the devil.

           You stare at past you for a second, noting the relief in his eyes that he's not you, the guilt that you're taking on the burden he thought through but doesn't have to actually do because this isn't stable, you're doomed, and that's the whole point.  
           Rose is looking over at the two of you, and she doesn't get it yet, and isn't that just fucking hilarious, your Seer doesn't see what you're about to do, you'd think this morbid sort of shit was right up her alley.  
The other you takes out his sword, the ribbitar—guess he knows you'd rather not bite it on the caledscratch, he's you after all—and when he plunges it into your chest, you manage to suppress most of the pathetic whimpering and shuddering. You feel a vague sense of relief, that he's the one doing this, though you guess it sucks to be him, having to live with the deaths of self after self after self, as you look at each of them and feel a flood of relief that you're still you and not the other guy, the other sap, the one that has to die. You wonder how many rounds of that it will take until Dave wishes he _was_ the other guy, the one that gets to stand there and take a sword to the chest and know it's coming and still stand there, feeling a little relieved, a little grateful, and mostly sad and angry that this is what you have to do.  
           You hope he gets better at killing himself in the future, because ow, this hurts, bleeding to death hurts, and you didn't want it to take this long. You're not supposed to have time to think about all those things you don't want to think about.  
           You can feel yourself slipping away though, however slowly. Your eyes widen for a last-minute panicked _jesus I hope Egbert and Harley don't have to do this how would they even_ —  
           And then there's no more you to think.

           You watch the other you die, ignoring the way Rose is staring at you like you've just gone insane. Then you pick up his arm, put away the ribbitar in favor of a long serrated blade, more longknife than sword, and slice off a chunk of meat from the dead you's arm.  
           Rose looks like she's—nope, there she goes, she's throwing up. Dry-heaving, mostly, because coming back to life reset your bodies, but it didn't fill your empty stomachs. S'okay though. You know she'll come around. Twenty days in, she'll be ready to eat anything. You should know. You caught her eating paper more than once, for fuck's sake. The meat in your hand feels slippery, though, and you can't help your own stomach roiling a little in response. Still. Food is food.  
           You open your mouth and, tilting your head back, slide a strip of raw meat in and take a bite.  
           Not gonna lie: You sort of taste delicious.


End file.
